FBI Chief: ’ISIL’ Bigger Threat than Al-Qaeda
Local Editor
"ISIL's" effort to inspire troubled Americans to violence has become more of a terror threat to the US than an external attack by al-Qaeda, the FBI director said Wednesday.
FBI Director James Comey told an audience at the Aspen Security Forum that "ISIL" has influenced a significant but unknown number of Americans through a year-long campaign on social media urging extremists who can't travel to the Middle East to "kill where you are."
Twitter handles affiliated with the group have more than 21,000 English-language followers worldwide, he said, thousands of whom may be US residents.
The FBI has arrested a significant number of people over the last eight weeks who had been radicalized, Comey said, without specifying a number. He repeated his previous disclosure, without elaborating, that several people were arrested who were planning attacks related to the July Fourth holiday. The bureau has hundreds of investigations pending into such cases across the country.
Comey said it was too soon to say how Mohammad Youssef Abdulazeez, the Chattanooga gunman who killed five US troops last week, became radicalized.
Asked if the threat from "ISIL" had eclipsed that of the rival organization that attacked the US on September 11, 2001, Comey said, "Yes."
The US has tracked dozens of Americans, ranging in age from 18 to 62, who have traveled to Syria or Iraq to fight with "ISIL", he said.
"I worry very much about what I can't see," Comey added, because he said "ISIL" recruiters use encrypted communication software to avoid US eavesdropping.
As recently as September, senior US intelligence officials were downplaying the group's capacity to attack the US Matt Olsen, then the head of the National Counter Terrorism Center, told Congress in September that the US had "no credible information that "ISIL" is planning to attack the United States."
Intelligence officials last year were saying they worry most about a mass casualty attack against a US airliner by al-Qaeda's Yemen affiliate, or by the Khorasan Group, a cadre of al-Qaeda operatives in Syria.
But Comey said Wednesday the threat from the Khorasan Group has been "significantly diminished" by US military strikes.
Source: News Agencies, Edited by website team
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